Academic Senate

Budget Update - Spring 2011

Last Thursday, College Council
considered the results of the budget deliberations conducted by the college’s
three Planning and Budget Teams (PBTs), and we want to share those results with
you.

1) Context: First, a reminder of the context: De Anza College began its
budget deliberations after learning that the governor’s January budget proposal
was not gaining the support it needed from Republican legislators to put a tax
extension measure on the June ballot. As a result, Foothill-De Anza needed to
plan for an “all-cuts” budget. This budget scenario forecast a $30 million cut
for the district, half of it to De Anza.

2) Allocations: Using the $15 million cut as a worst-case scenario, the
college’s leadership allocated shares of the cut to the three areas of the
college:

·
Instruction ($9,144,514, or 60%)

·
Student Services ($4,877,074, or 32%)

·
Finance and Educational Resources ($1,066,860, or 7%)

The share allocated to Instruction
was smaller than their 79% share of the college budget, while the share
allocated to Student Services was larger than their share. This was done to
minimize the cut to instructional programs, as the college receives its funding
through enrollment. The cut to Finance and Educational Resources was
proportional to their share of the budget.

3) Process: The budget review process was radically decentralized so as
to maximize the input and dialogue across the broadest number of faculty and
staff. Each division and program reviewed its share of the cut in order to
establish priorities.

4) College Council: Last Thursday, the 27th, the co-chairs of each
PBT presented the budget reduction scenarios developed through their process,
and each was reviewed by College Council.

Two things were immediately
apparent. First, there was no way to make cuts of this magnitude without
irreparably harming our ability to serve students. Second, there would be
little chance of maintaining our enrollment if we had to cut both Instructional
programs and Student Services. At the $15 million level, we would be cutting
more than 1,200 course sections, reducing counseling and advising staff to
levels at which little counseling could take place, cutting Financial Aid staff
so severely that we would no longer support work study or scholarship programs,
and limiting access to precisely the students most in need.

Surely, one would think, there had
to be an alternative. Did the governor’s “May Revise” give us hope?

5) The May Revision to the State
Budget: Good news, maybe. Even while the
college was deliberating an all-cuts, worst-case scenario, we were heartened by
the governor’s updated budget proposal. In it, he announced that tax receipts
were up an estimated $6.4 billion, and he made no further cuts to the community
colleges. Were his latest proposal to be successful, we would face a smaller
cut to the district, although it’s difficult to hazard a guess as to exactly
what it might look like.

So, we are now in a form of budget
limbo: the governor’s new proposal still depends on an extension of taxes,
though to a lesser degree. We are somewhat assured that the final budget cut to
the district will not be the full $30 million, though none of us knows where it
will land.

6) Now what? Last Thursday, College Council voted unanimously to accept
the PBT proposals, with the understanding that such reductions are untenable.
The college president will deliver the budget scenarios to the board of
trustees as an alert, in effect, of what the consequences of an all-cuts budget
would be: De Anza College would be inoperable.

The good news is that we do not have
to cut immediately, even if the state does not yet know how much it will give
us. We do have sufficient one-time reserves to get us deep into next year, and
maybe through it, before pulling the trigger on deep reductions. This also
gives our collective bargaining units time to deliberate with the district
regarding other options to the layoff of employees.

7) The “Stability Fund” and how we
get through next year: We have
adequate one-time funds to offer a full summer and fall quarter program, and
even try to regain the roughly 5% of enrollment we lost this year. If the cut
to the district is down to $23 million, we can probably get through the entire
2011-2012 year intact, and use that time to plan for the 2012-2013 year. The
dramatic cut would then occur in the 2012-2013 year, mitigated by whatever
growth in state revenues occurs.

8) Advocacy: We still need to advocate for community college funding in
Sacramento, and to focus our efforts on persuading four Republicans (two in
each house of the Legislature) to pass a budget with the tax extensions.

9) Bittersweet Thanks: All three of us want to express our deep appreciation to
the faculty, classified staff and administrators who worked so hard over the
past six weeks on the most miserable professional assignment any of us has ever
had. This process saw deep, respectful and thoughtful engagement at every
step. It is scant good news that the cuts might be less than we have had
to plan for, as one of the things we learned was how deeply interdependent we
are on each other. The Instructional programs depend on Student Services, and
both depend on the good people working in Finance and Educational Resources. Most
critically, our students need us all. The college has a deep commitment to the
most vulnerable among us, and to the core of our work—in transfer, basic skills
and career technical education. We intend to honor those commitments, even as
the state seems bent on retreating from them.